Thursday, December 01, 2016

Tony Perkins and the Family Research Council constantly uses junk science.

It took the online magazine Wired only one article to do to the anti-lgbt Family Research Council what I have been attempting to do for over a decade and what our lgbt leaders should be doing on a daily basis

The Family Research Council isn’t content to oppose homosexuality on
religious grounds; instead, it uses pseudoscience to give its homophobia
a flimsy veneer of objectivity. And it could wind up shaping the
incoming president’s policies.

. . . That the FRC has found its way back into a position of influence over
the presidency shouldn’t come as a huge surprise. The group has been
making political moves since the early 1980s. Since then, it’s grown to
become the most successful progeny of an effort among social
conservatives to move the basis of their policy recommendations away
from Scripture and toward sociology. Not that legitimate sociology is
where the FRC has arrived. Rather, the group is to homophobia what the National Policy Institute
is to the alt-right—a bland, respectable-sounding, quasi-academic front
for a hateful, regressive ideology. It comes packaged in a way that
looks like real science but is really just cherry-picked data stitched
together to serve its agenda.

. . . The papers the FRC produces often purport to be meta-analyses—studies of
studies. Rather than compiling an accurate synthesis of mainstream
scientific inquiry, however, the group mis-contextualizes data to arrive
at a desired conclusion. This technique is how the FRC manages to link
homosexuality to, among other things, pedophilia and shortened
lifespans, despite strong scientific consensus to the contrary. When the
group is not twisting mainstream scientists’ numbers, it’s citing
organizations such as the American College of Pediatricians, which sure sounds like the American Academy of Pediatrics but is actually a far-right breakaway group with only 200 members.

It’s pretty much the same story with the research FRC produces
itself. “The FRC’s research is just a giant exercise in selection bias,”
says Philip Cohen, a sociologist at the University of Maryland. “If
being rich makes you more likely to be married, a study that says being
married makes you rich will always find that result.”

The FRC has mis-designed many sociological experiments. If you want
to study whether children fare better emotionally when raised by
heterosexual or homosexual married couples, as FRC purported to do,
you would need to make sure all conditions besides the parents’ sexual
orientations were the same in order to truly compare them. Instead, the
FRC study mostly looked at children of same-sex couples that weren’t
married, had pre-existing emotional troubles, and were the offspring of
previous marriages that ended when one parent came out. The FRC’s
findings don’t even pass a basic scientific smell test, according to the American Sociological Association. What’s more, the group’s work isn’t peer-reviewed.

If there is any time a wake up call is due for the lgbt community, it is now. It's time we stop playing FRC's game and put them on the defensive for a change It's long overdue.

About Me

Alvin McEwen is 46-year-old African-American gay man who resides in Columbia, SC.
McEwen's blog, Holy Bullies and Headless Monsters, and writings have been mentioned by Americablog.com, Goodasyou.org, People for the American Way, PageOneQ.com, The Washington Post, Raw Story, The Advocate, Media Matters for America, Crooksandliars.com, Thinkprogress.org, Andrew Sullivan's Daily Dish, Melissa Harris-Perry, The Last Word with Lawrence O'Donnell, Newsweek, The Daily Beast, The Washington Blade, and Foxnews.com.
In addition, he is also a past contributor to Pam's House Blend,Justice For All, LGBTQ Nation, and Alternet.org. He is a present contributor to the Daily Kos and the Huffington Post,
He is the 2007 recipient of the Harriet Daniels Hancock Volunteer of the Year Award and the 2010 recipient of the Order of the Pink Palmetto from the SC Pride Movement as well as the 2009 recipient of the Audre Lorde/James Baldwin Civil Rights Activist Award from SC Black Pride. In addition, he is a three-time nominee of the Ed Madden Media Advocacy Award from SC Pride.